Startled by the kindness

Armchair twitter aficionados managed to track down a gang of thugs who had put two victims in hospital after a brutal beating.  Within eight minutes of the police releasing CCTV footage (remarkably clear compared to the usual hazy footage) of the gang walking down a Philadelphia pavement.  The sleuths used Facebook pictures to find the first thug.  Success in tracking down the rest soon followed.  The thugs like all of us post photographs on Facebook of them in large groups celebrating.  This perennial desire to take selfies, share personal information, names and details online became a breadcrumb trail to all the gang members.  The whole thing triggered by a single twitter on the attack.  The police were able to arrest the whole gang swiftly.  A tale of success is a rare event in our online existence.  Usually, online presence is a contributor to bullying, abuse, an invitation to porn, a conduit to online gambling etc none of which have outcomes usually of much benefit to mankind.

My mother’s hometown of Ballymoney in Northern Ireland has spent money buying huge live-like photographs to stick in shop windows in derelict streets.  

It has become all the rage and Belfast etc abounds in these fake shops.  You drive past a camera shop, flower shop, an old fashioned bakery that remind you of villages of childhood. All completely fake.  

Instead of boarded up premises you seem to see quaint country life around you.  Even a fake walled garden with flowers peeping around corners.  One old cinema has for several years had pasted across it an optimistic sign across its front in foot high print proudly boasting “New hotel to be built here 2012”.  No one bothers to change the date so the lie continues to boost of forthcoming non-existing developments.  

I’m not sure why but all of this plunges me into despair.  It reminds me of Catherine the Great’s 18^th century triumphal procession through the streets of Russia.  When fronts of buildings on the route were made to look grand and areas spruced up to create a pleasing spectacle for the Empress as she passed.  These hid from her sight the destitution and poverty that existed (or so the legend goes).

When was it that we learned to shut off our brains to the truth?  That having a pretence of normality was better than acknowledging facts?  In these days when the gap between the rich and the poor has never been wider, the general public’s time is channelled into buying someone else’s rubbish or lining the pockets of the rich via clever schemes.  Our virtual online web placates us while a growing proportion (perhaps 37%-70%) is devoted to porn.  Turn to the local newspaper (tabloid) and find what illuminates the general public today.  They are aimed at those with an average reading age of 11, I kid you not!  The Sun is famous for many tragic covers, but remains the most popular tabloid.  For example “The Sun's coverage of the Hillsborough football stadium disaster in Sheffield on 15 April 1989, in which 96 people died as a result of their injuries, proved to be, as the paper later admitted, the "most terrible" blunder in its history.”  They claimed “ that some fans picked the pockets of crushed victims, that others urinated on members of the emergency services as they tried to help and that some even assaulted a police constable "whilst he was administering the kiss of life to a patient.”  All complete rot but it took over two decades before the truth was allowed to emerge.  Another memorable release was On 17 November 1989, The Sun headlined a page 2 news story titled "STRAIGHT SEX CANNOT GIVE YOU AIDS – OFFICIAL."   

Oh yes, indeed these guys have no morals or squeamishness about publishing complete lies.  The Sun remains popular to this day but in Liverpool because of the Hillsborough coverage it is still not favoured.  The northern populace has a long memory of the Sun’s betrayal of the truth and many newspaper shops to this day refuse to even stock the paper.  Such tabloids brimming with salacious titbits and massive misinformation are I fear unlikely to produce an enlightened populace.

I started this by pointing out how technology was used to solve a crime.  There are things that, with the right call can be used as a force for good in this world.  Behind the curtain of distracting smoke screens, fears, fancies lie millions of good people.  Start talking to someone/anyone in the supermarket, on a train, bus, visiting the hospital and you will be startled by the kindness that is there in almost every heart.  So, I choose to look at all the crap we are awash with in video/print/audio and feel it has become the scum on the surface of society.  It no longer reflects the reality of what lies within but the churned up pollution that floats to the surface.  Just beneath, I want to think there is an ocean of kindness.  Good people all around the world who do their best in spite of a system that seems to play by its own corrupt rules.